Archive for November, 2006
oh well
Fuck it. I’m taking a day off erging. Rudder’s got a work-drinks thing, so I took the bus home. Got here at 6:30, did some online banking (found my credit card balance was much higher than I’d thought, dammit, and I didn’t get paid today as I should have DAMMIT!) and now it’s 6:45. And [...]
of stuff
I hit a small cultural divide yesterday; I think I handled it well enough. I’ve been working closely with one other person, who’s been moved into the office I share with my boss. (The department is very short on space just now.) It finally occurred to me that the reason I was feeling so oppressed [...]
It’s a Dutch thing, I wouldn’t understand
On our way out to pick up some food this evening, we observed three items presumably of holiday decoration. In order of progressive bizarreness: 1) Some men were putting lights in, to shine up from the grates in the ground. Plain white lights. Why? 2) On the local big old church (every town here has [...]
Christmas: the Borg of holidays
I commented one of my email discussion groups that I can well understand why a lot of Dutch people seem to resent the way American-style Christmas is moving in here, because it tends to push out their own Sinterklaas traditions. Quite a few people pointed out that it was after all people’s own choice to [...]
Nederlinguistics
One interesting thing about Dutch is that it does borrow from other languages, though possibly not as much as English does. Of course, epople at work use English frequently even when speaking in Dutch; a lot of management jargon was clearly just imported straight over, though I’ve heard standard English words mixed in as well. [...]
incompatibilities
I’m beginning to think that one of the biggest problems in my life is Rudder, which is unfortunate as he’s also one of the better things in it. Getting rid of him is clearly a Bad Idea, and I think the problem is too intrinsic to be fixable. You know how I always complained about [...]
review: Drawn to the Rhythm
I’m currently reading Drawn to the Rhythm: A Passionate Life Reclaimed” by Sara Hall. It’s been a while since I’ve reading something that alternates so frequently between lyrical and painful. Hall was more or less knocked off her feet by her first sight of a single rower; she knew she had to learn to row [...]
the present problem
Apparently I’ve been doing too much shopping again. We need to make a Christmas list for Rudder’s parents (which is also a Hanukah list for mine, but his family is the one with the list tradition) and I really can’t think of much I want. There are a couple of places I wouldn’t mind gift [...]
the present problem
Apparently I’ve been doing too much shopping again. We need to make a Christmas list for Rudder’s parents (which is also a Hanukah list for mine, but his family is the one with the list tradition) and I really can’t think of much I want. There are a couple of places I wouldn’t mind gift [...]
the present problem
Apparently I’ve been doing too much shopping again. We need to make a Christmas list for Rudder’s parents (which is also a Hanukah list for mine, but his family is the one with the list tradition) and I really can’t think of much I want. There are a couple of places I wouldn’t mind gift [...]